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Digital Two Way Radios

The majority of the leading two way radio manufacturers having moving away from analogue only radios towards digital radios for a number of years.

Digital two way radio offers you a range of benefits including:

Better coverage

Clearer audio

Better battery life

Increased privacy

Increased channel capacity

Digital radios are also the focus of application development allowing the radios to be used for much more than their traditional uses with advanced applications such as:

Alarm management

GPS Location

Indoor location

Radio telephony integration

Job ticketing

Most digital two way radios provide users with dual mode functionality - they can operate as an analogue radio or as a digital radio and therefore make migration from analogue to digital a process that can be staged to suit the technical and budgetary needs of your organisation.

TDMA and FDMA Digital solutions

Video courtesy of Tait, delivered by YouTube

It should be noted that whilst almost all the major manufacturers have introduced digital two way radios, they have taken different paths with regards protocols - this means that unlike analogue cross brand compatibility, more care must be taken to choose the right protocol.

TDMA - Time Division Multiple Access

TDMA uses the full 12.5 kHz channel and divides it into two independent time slots to achieve 6.25 kHz efficiency. This doubles the calling capacity in one frequency channel for two simultaneous digital conversations to occur in a single channel.

Known as DMR, manufacturers adopting this core protocol include Motorola, Hytera, Sepura, Vertex Standard, Tait and Simoco. Kenwood and Icom now also provide DMR models along side their FDMA products - dPMR, Nexedge (Kenwood) and IDAS (Icom).

FDMA - Frequency Division Multiple Access

FDMA splits a frequency band into narrow sub-channels and does not use the full capacity of the entire 12.5 kHz channel.

Known in the UK as dPMR and NXDN™, manufacturers adopting this protocol include Kenwood and Icom with their respective Nexedge™ and IDAS systems.

Sound complicated?

If you are considering a migration to digital we recommend you seek advice. Get in touch with us and we'll be happy to talk it through with you and help you make the right choices for the needs of your organisation.